Modernizr 1.6 & The Road To 2.0

Today we’re announcing the new Modernizr 1.6, an interim release in the run-up to the upcoming Modernizr 2.0—a release slated for later this year which will take the library to the next level.

Before we get into what’s new in 1.6, we want to quickly thank Darcy Clarke for his quick but handy CSS tweaks to our site, cleaning things up a little and improving legibility. Much like today’s 1.6 release, these changes to the site reflect some of what’s coming up in the new 2.0 release and the “2.0” website, if you will.

As said, Modernizr 1.6 is an interim release and closes some important issues while adding a few new detections. Besides bringing it down to a mere 3.8Kb minified and gzipped, the biggest improvement is a completely revised @font-face test, which fixes the FOUT—Flash Of Unstyled Text—which was a somewhat common issue when combining Modernizr with Typekit.

We’ve also added support for WebGL, Touch events, Flexible Box Layouts and Inline SVG. Additionally, several existing tests have been improved to better support newer browser releases, as well as fix some minor bugs.

There are some important changes in 1.6: first, the Modernizr.websqldatabase test has been simplified. It no longer creates a database, which solves an annoying Safari pop-up issue and stops Modernizr from littering the web with databases, but it comes at somewhat of a cost: Chrome in Incognito mode will now false-positive on this test. The extended test remains commented-out in the non-minified source, for those who need it to be exact.

Second, we’ve deprecated two properties: Modernizr.crosswindowmessaging and Modernizr.historymanagement. Going forward, these two properties are simply:

Modernizr.postmessage

Modernizr.history

Simpler, cleaner, and they now match the actual DOM property they’re testing for. Keep in mind that, as with other tests, the Modernizr property is all-lowercase but the actual DOM property is window.postMessage.

Lastly, we’ve put the oft-requested CSS text-shadow test in this release. It still false-positives in Firefox 3.0, but we think web designers are okay with that these days.

We hope you enjoy this new release, and stay tuned for big changes with the upcoming Modernizr 2.0!